Critiques of the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind
Part 3 of a 5-Part Series of the Early Draft Essay "The Eye of Value"
The issue, however, is not the Eye of the Senses or the Eye of the Mind. They are not on trial, and the attempt of so many contemporary writers to indict the productions of Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind—and with them, the two Eyes that produced them—is, at best, ill-conceived and, at worst, highly destructive.
One of the most prominent of this kind of implicit critiques is found in the new-age bestseller The Power of Now, which focuses on the pathology of the Eyes of the Mind and the Senses with their focus on the past and future which ignore—so goes the story—the Power of Now.[1] Indeed, there is an entire industry of new-age thought, strange amalgamations of postmodernism and Buddhist fundamentalist religious thought, which all savage the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind as generative of all that is degrading and devastating to the depth of presence that is required to capacitate the survival of humanity and the ecosystems of life.
Of course, The Power of Now, and other works like it, blithely ignores the fact that it took hundreds of millions of years of evolution to generate the neocortex with its capacity to step out of the Now and imagine past and future.
That said, the critique of the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind that underlies this cacophony of voices is not at all incorrect. To reify the correctness of their point—at least in pointing out the crippling limitations of the Eye of the Mind and the Eye of the Spirit—we will illustrate by harking back for a moment to the distinction we made above between two schools of modernity.
The first school, or worldview, understands the world as atomistic and mechanistic, and hence fractured and fragmented, hopelessly divided against itself, all of which exploded, on the human level, in the success story of rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics. This is said to be the Newtonian/Cartesian view of the manifest world, which itself is only partially correct as both Newton and Descartes actually believed in a much more paradoxical view of Reality. But that is for another time.
The new worldview that is said to respond to this first school is that of quantum physics, the new sciences, coupled with systems theory and its more mathematical offshoots—complexity and chaos theories. This worldview is said to show—and indeed they do—that world is not atomized bits, bytes, and parts, but rather, an inextricably enmeshed web of relationships—what is often called the web of life. Books by this name mesh with books by names like Quantum Self and chapters on Quantum Society, which are taken together to be part of what is often called the new paradigm, which is taken to generate this new self and new society.
The conclusion of this line of thinking is that science—exterior science in the form of the Eye of the Mind—will by itself usher in the New Human and the New Humanity that is necessary to respond to existential and catastrophic risk. And then, everyone is somewhat shocked and then depressed—a depression that turns to a studied indifference when none of the results of the new paradigm actually materialize. But in fact, a scientist can think they understand systems theory, and its offshoots complexity and chaos theory, perfectly well without having engaged any practices to open the Eye of Consciousness [in any of its expressions as the Eye of Value, the Eye of the Spirit, the Eye of Contemplation, or the Eye of the Heart].
When these two Eyes of the Mind and the Senses are split off from the Eye of Consciousness, [the Eye of the Spirit, the Eye of the Heart, the Eye of Contemplation, the Eye of Value]—which we have unfolded above—these two Eyes can mistakenly be viewed in mechanistic terms, as indeed they often are, as generating a reality that is dead.
This is then coupled with a presentation in culture of very limited views of those Eyes [the Eye of the Senses and Eye of the Mind] in terms of their surface expressions, while ignoring the deeper visionary capacity of their depth expressions. We will turn to examples of their depth expressions below.
The issue then is not per se the limitations of the Eyes of the Mind and the Senses. These limitations, at least in their surface expressions, are of course real. Complexity theory can easily be misunderstood as a system of interconnected its. That is indeed the weakness of the new paradigm thinking. But complexity theory can only be misunderstood in this reductionist and deadening matter, when it is split off from the Eye of Consciousness [the Eye of Value, the Eye of the Spirit, the Eye of the Heart, and the Eye of Contemplation].
Photography by Kristina Tahel Amelong
And indeed, for many modern scientists, there is a virtually impenetrable Chinese Wall between these Eyes, and that is, if the scientist recognizes the interior Eyes at all as empirically valid. This splitting off of the Eyes is only expressed in terms of the dogmatic sciences claiming that only the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind are empirically valid, when in fact, the Eye of Consciousness [Contemplation, Value, Spirit, Heart] generates data—no less than the Eyes of the Senses and the Mind.
The data, however, is of different nature. It is the data of contemplation, the heart, spirit, and value, generated by the empirical methods of experimentation and subject to the unique validity tests of these different expressions of the Eye of Consciousness, as we pointed towards above.
But this split also expresses itself in the interior split within the scientist—the split from his or her own curiosity, her own love of gnosis, her own Eros, her own passionate pursuit of goodness, truth, and beauty, her own attunement to the truths of mathematics, and so much more. All of this is dismissed as merely subjective and split off the ostensibly objective reality of the exterior world. But of course, as we have already pointed towards above, this is an arbitrary split, limiting empiricism to narrow confines, not for scientific reasons, but as a colonizing power move in the politics of the real.
In truth, not only do we need all three Eyes, but all three Eyes are interdigitated—inter-included—in each other. Thus—and this is our additional point at this juncture—once the Eye of Consciousness [Eye of the Heart, Eye of Value, Eye of Contemplation, Eye of the Spirit] is open, then it opens its unique expression in the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind.
The image below makes the inter-inclusion clear:[2]
Let’s briefly unpack this, only as is necessary for our immediate point here, which will be the desired and necessary inter-inclusion of all the Eyes, in order to yield any sort of accurate picture, or experience, of Reality—and particularly to know, through all of the Eyes, that Love is real and the foundational Reality of Cosmos.
In a world that is whole, not fragmented and fractured at its very core, we realize the self-evident ontic truth, that all three Eyes are expressions of the same One Faculty of human perception. They are, if you will, an ontological trinity that cannot be split.
Each eye is distinct. Each Eye must be granted its place. And yet, they all must and do inform each other. We will offer several self-evident examples of this crucial point.
First, the Eye of the Mind and mathematics.
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First Values & First Principles
Forty-Two Propositions on CosmoErotic Humanism, the Meta-Crisis, and the World to Come
by David J. Temple
AS THE META-CRISIS DEEPENS, THE FATE OF CIVILIZATION AND HUMANITY HANGS IN THE BALANCE.
First Principles and First Values is the tip of the spear in the fight for a humane future. Establishing frameworks for a new school of thought called CosmoErotic Humanism, the book is built around forty-two propositions that provide new source code for the future of planetary culture.
Like Europe in the early Renaissance, humanity is in a time between worlds, at a time between stories. First Principles and First Values contains blueprints for the bridge needed to cross from this world to the next.
“The position argued for in this book is of vital importance . . . it needs urgently to be read.”
IAIN McGILCHRIST, author of The Master and His Emissary
David J. Temple is a pseudonym created for enabling ongoing collaborative authorship at the Center for World Philosophy and Religion, a leading international think tank whose mission is to address existential risk by articulating a shared universal Story of Value for global intimacy and global coordination. The Center focuses its work on a world philosophy, CosmoErotic Humanism, as the ground for a global vision of value, economics, politics, and spiritual coherence. The two primary authors behind David J. Temple are Marc Gafni and Zak Stein. For different projects specific writers will be named as part of the collaboration. In this volume Ken Wilber joins Dr. Gafni and Dr. Stein.
Mathematics & The Eye of the Mind
Mathematics itself, as we have alluded to in the main body of the text, is, in some sense, both a servant to the classic exterior sciences, performed in mathematical value equations, and an interior science, that is, an expression of the perceptions of the inward eye. Mathematics works—or what has been called the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences[3]—for the same reasons that, as we pointed towards above, the rest of science works. Human science works because we are cosmic humans. Mathematics and the laws of science live inside of us or else we could not articulate them.
The scientist can span the Cosmos in his mathematics because, in some very real sense, the span of the Cosmos lives in her. Mathematics—like poetry or music—discloses intimate patterns of Reality, interior landscapes of often virtually unbearable beauty and truth. These patterns map on to the structure of the world disclosed by the Eye of the Senses. The speed of falling objects, the trajectory of a space shuttle, and the movement of the planets, for example, are best expressed in the language of mathematics—in mathematical formulas that give an explanation to the actual measured results of experiments and can even predict outcomes that have never been measured before. In other words, these intimate interior patterns are embedded in manifest Cosmos itself and mirrored in our own interiors. They cannot be seen with the Eye of the Flesh—the senses [for example, Boolean algebra[4]]—but they govern the world of the senses.
And yet, modernity has amply demonstrated that it is entirely possible to be a Nobel-prize-level expert in muons and mathematics—think Steven Weinberg, for example—and yet, to reduce the Cosmos to being lifeless and passionless. The self-evident absurdity of this is lost on the scientist—after all, the scientist making the claim is himself filled with life, passion, and value—and the scientist is an expression of the universe itself. The scientist not only lives in the universe, but the universe lives in him. For the scientist, to make such a claim is to make an utterly pathological split between the scientist and the universe. And indeed, such pathologies are an expression of the root cause of existential risk—the global intimacy disorder. The split is often healed—by what the interior sciences call a tikkun—when the scientist herself has an experience of the Eye of Consciousness—either through intentional practice or as a spontaneous gift of Cosmos.
This opening of the Eye of Consciousness in the scientists has been described in an important branch of literature on what philosopher Jeffrey Kripal called The Flip, in a book by that name, in which one chapter is devoted to the experience of several flipped scientists.[5]
Although Kripal does not deploy our nomenclature of distinction between the multiple Eyes, he is talking about the same epistemological issues. He tells of scientists who were highly trained in the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind—who were dogmatically committed to the assumptions of reductive materialism. Said simply, they had no access to the Eye of Consciousness [the Eye of Value, the Eye of the Spirit, the Eye of the Heart, or the Eye of Contemplation]. But for figures like the eminent British logical positivist [and materialist] A. J. Ayer, spontaneous experiences—in his case a near-death experience—shook his worldview. He wrote not long after the following:
“On the face of it these experiences…are rather strong evidence that death does not put an end to consciousness.”[6]
Barbara Ehrenreich is another example of a scientist [a highly trained cell biologist and later science journalist] who grows up in the several generations of a family in which militant materialism is the axiomatic family creed, which she takes as her own. At age seventeen, she has an experience that opens the Eye of Consciousness.
For some, the experience of consciousness appears as radical aliveness, and for others, it appears as radical Love. The two are often—as we know anthro-ontologically from our own experience—virtually inseparable. John Pierrakos, a student of Wilhelm Reich, and founder of Core Energetics—a form of somatic psychology that is based on extensive clinical empirical data—affirms that “at their center people are a pulsating core of energy that is love…When people are in touch with their CORE they love themselves and their fellow creatures.”[7]
In Ehrenreich’s account, both elements, the aliveness of energy and relational love, are both present.
Ehrenreich is in a state of physical stress and exhaustion as a result of skiing coupled with sleep and food deprivation, a state not entirely dissimilar than those intentionally invoked to open the Eye of the Spirit in vision quest ceremonies of native populations world over. And this is what happened:
…the world flamed into life … this blazing everywhere. Something poured into me and I poured into it. This was not the passive beatific merger with “the All,” as promised by Eastern mystics.[8] It was a furious encounter with a living substance coming at me through all things at once...
Nothing could contain it. Everywhere, “inside” and out, the only condition was overflow.[9]
Notice the sense of intimate ecstatic loving:
“Something poured into me and I poured into it.”
Here, as is often the case in direct experience of the Real, the personal and ostensibly impersonal, the ostensibly inanimate and the animate are not ultimately separate. The something Ehrenreich describes evokes both a third-person what and a second-person who. Reality discloses as sentience all the way up and all the way down, itself a core data point of many interior sciences, as we have discussed in early writings on CosmoErotic Humanism.[10]
The core quality described is, of course, the radical aliveness and the dynamic quality of being and its constant becoming. Remember, in this context, our Eros equation, which we adduced briefly above,
Eros = the experience of radical aliveness, seeking—desiring—moving towards—ever-deeper contact and ever-greater wholeness.
A final example of a reductionist scientist who opens the Eye of Consciousness—this time with specific emphasis on the Eye of the Heart—is the thoroughly documented story of Dr. Eben Alexander. Alexander, a Harvard Medical school professor and staunch reductionist materialist, falls into a full coma for seven days, due to an intense health crisis. He describes his experience as ultimately real.
In his words,[11]
The place I went was real. Real in a way that makes the life we're living here and now completely dreamlike by comparison.
which causes him to
value life the life I’m living now…more than I ever did before…because I now see it in its true context.
Alexander’s opening of the Eye of Consciousness is mediated, in large part, through the prism of the Eye of the Heart. Here are some of his descriptions:
I was encountering the reality of a world of consciousness that existed completely free of the limitations of my physical brain…under the gaze of a God who loves and cares about each one of us and about where the universe and all the beings within it are ultimately going…there is not one universe but many, in fact—far more than I could conceive—but that love lay at the center of them all.
He sees through the Eye of the Heart that the foundation of Reality is love
…beyond all of the different types of love we have down here on earth. It was something higher, holding all of those other kinds of love within itself, while at the same time being more genuine and pure than all of them.
It communicated the truth of
You are loved and cherished dearly, forever.
The energy of aliveness and love intertext here, as in Ehrenreich’s and many other descriptions of the Eye of Consciousness. Alexander experiences
an explosion of light, color, love, and beauty that blew through me like a crashing wave.
In all of these images, the Eye of Consciousness does not contradict but rather perfectly meshes and synergizes with the Eye of the Senses and the Eye of the Mind. But at the same time, there is a tikkun, an evolutionary healing, of the fracture between the often disassociated dimensions of Real.
And, as we have pointed out through the writings of CosmoErotic Humanism, it is this disassociation that generates the failed stories of modernity and postmodernity—Success 2.0—rivalrous conflict governed by win/lose metrics—which itself generate the fragile complicated systems, extraction models, exponential growth curves, and multipolar traps that are—as we have shown in the section of this Monograph called “What Is the Meta-Crisis?” —direct cause for catastrophic and existential risk.
It is therefore only the re-weaving of the disassociated fabric of the Real—through integrating the data of all of the forms of the Eye of Consciousness—that will generate a New Story of Value rooted in First Principles and First Values, which in turn generates the New Human and the New Humanity—the move from Homo sapiens to Homo amor—that can effectively respond to the existential challenges in this time between worlds.
The Reweaving of the Dissociated Strands of the Real: Integrating the Three Eyes
In this sense, as we will note below the Eye of the Mind, when animated appropriately—with differentiation and not disassociation from the Eye of Consciousness [the Eye of the Spirit, Contemplation, Value, the Heart]—turns out not to be reductive materialist but rather an expression of the Intimate Universe.
Mathematics by itself may be dogmatically interpreted in reductionist terms only when the Eye of Consciousness is either closed or denied in its entirety.
A startling model of the interweaving of the Eye of the Mind and the Eye of Consciousness in mathematics is Ramanujan, whom we already cited above. In his example, we see not only an example of the Eye of Consciousness—the Eye of the Heart and the Eye of Value—as vivifying the interior consciousness that is mathematics but also as serving as a source for mathematical intuition.
Intuition in science is, of course, the fairy dust of science, which is generally left unexplained, as if calling it intuition had already accounted for the fact that is self-evidently not explicable in reductionist materialist terms.
The great mathematician Alan Turing, considered the father of the computer—the first simple models of which were originally called automatic or computing machines by Turing and later Turing machines[12]—writing after World War II, when the materialist paradigm of science was absolute dogma, remarks,
These disturbing phenomena seem to deny our all of our usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit them! Unfortunately, the statistical evidence…is overwhelming. It is very difficult to rearrange one’s idea to fit these new facts in.[13]
With that in mind, we turn from Turing to his fellow mathematician whose lives briefly overlapped in England, Ramanujan:[14]
On 16 January 1913, Srinivasa Ramanujan, an unknown Indian petty clerk from Madras, sent nine pages of mathematics to the esteemed mathematician of Trinity College, Cambridge, Prof. G.H. Hardy. Previous attempts to share his work with British academics had failed…Even the esteemed mathematician G.H. Hardy of Cambridge first suspected that these nine pages of notation could be a fraud.
Yet, perusing the document, Hardy became intrigued. He recognized some of the Indian’s formulae, but others “seemed scarcely possible to believe.” Some of the formulas were already known, but after seeing Ramanujan’s theorems on continued fractions on the last page of the manuscripts, Hardy commented that he “had never seen anything in the least like them before.” He conjectured that Ramanujan’s theorems “must be true, because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them.” What ensued was the discovery of one of the greatest mathematicians, and some of the highest impact pure mathematics of the last century. The collaboration that followed between Hardy, Littlewood and Ramanujan would continue until Ramanujan’s premature death at age 32.
…the nature of Ramanujan’s mathematical genius, and how he himself perceived it, [is not well] explored. Hardy called it some kind of deep ‘intuition,’ but Ramanujan openly stated that he received the mathematical inspiration and sometimes whole formulas, through contacting the Hindu Goddess Namagiri while dreaming.
Ramanujan was an observant Hindu, adept at dream interpretation and astrology. Growing up, he learned to worship Namagiri, the Hindy Goddess of creativity. He often understood mathematics and spirituality as one. He felt, for example, that zero represented Absolute Reality, and that infinity represented the many manifestations of that Reality.
Famously he is reported to have said:
“An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.”
…
Ramanujan was the first Indian professor to become a Fellow at Cambridge University. Hardy said: “He combined a power of generalization, a feeling for form, and a capacity for rapid modification of his hypotheses, that were often really startling, and made him, in his own peculiar field, without a rival in his day. The limitations of his knowledge were as startling as its profundity. Here was a man who could work out modular equations and theorems… to orders unheard of, whose mastery of continued fractions was… beyond that of any mathematician in the world, who had found for himself the functional equation of the zeta function and the dominant terms of many of the most famous problems in the analytic theory of numbers; and yet he had never heard of a doubly periodic function or of Cauchy’s theorem, and had indeed but the vaguest idea of what a function of a complex variable was…”
As for his place in the world of Mathematics, Paul Erdös of Israel’s Technion passed on Hardy’s personal ratings of mathematicians. Suppose that we rate mathematicians on the basis of pure talent on a scale from 0 to 100, Hardy gave himself a score of 25, J.E. Littlewood 30, David Hilbert 80 and Ramanujan 100.
When he returned to India, Ramanujan was again gravely ill. From his death bed, he continued to write notes from revelations in dreams, which he believed were gifts from the Hindu Goddess. In a last letter to Hardy, Ramanujan shared his latest insights. The letter described several new functions that behaved differently from known theta functions, or modular forms, and yet closely mimicked them. Ramanujan conjectured that his ‘mock’ modular forms corresponded to the ordinary modular forms earlier identified by Carl Jacobi, and that both would wind up with similar outputs for roots of 1.
No one at the time understood what Ramanujan was talking about. “It wasn’t until 2002, through the work of Sander Zwegers, that we had a description of the functions that Ramanujan was writing about in 1920,” said Emory mathematician Ken Ono.
Building on that description, Ono and his colleagues went a step further. They drew on modern mathematical tools that had not been developed before Ramanujan’s death to prove that a mock modular form could be computed just as Ramanujan predicted. They found that while the outputs of a mock modular form shoot off into enormous numbers, the corresponding ordinary modular form expands at close to the same rate. So when you add up the two outputs or, in some cases, subtract them from one another, the result is a relatively small number, such as four, in the simplest case.
“We proved that Ramanujan was right,” Ono says. “We found the formula explaining one of the visions that he believed came from his Goddess… No one was talking about black holes back in the 1920s when Ramanujan first came up with mock modular forms, and yet, his work may unlock secrets about them.”
It is, of course, self-evidently obvious that a great mathematician can be an avowed materialist. Indeed, such was the case with Hardy and Ramanujan’s colleague at Cambridge, at the time, Bertrand Russell. Russell writes Principia Mathematica [15] with Alfred North Whitehead, who himself is a key proponent of the Eye of the Heart, what Whitehead would have called the Eye of Eros, which explains the myth of scientific materialism. Russell, however, is himself a wonderful example of what Abraham Kook called heresy which is faith.
Russell rebels against what Kook calls small conceptions of the Infinite[16] of the kind that dominated culture for the entire millennium preceding Russell and against which he, together with much of culture, had appropriately rebelled. And indeed, Russell himself understood that he could not explain his own inner knowing to himself without at least the Eye of Value.
He remarks:
I find myself incapable of believing that all that is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I do not like it.[17]
Russell understands the need for the Eye of Value that discloses intrinsic value in Cosmos beyond personal preference.
We think that theoretical physics, with its extensive usage of mathematics, has nothing to say about our place in the universe. But that is, of course, intuitively absurd. It is not that physics, in the language of mathematics, has nothing to say on this. Mathematical equations of physics might disclose extremely important information about the precise and elegant functioning of the human being within the larger system of the universe.
One version of this scientific mathematical disclosure, for example, is called the anthropic principle, in both its weak and strong forms.
The anthropic principle, in an oversimplified word, is the precise finetuning of the Cosmos—some sixty constants in the universe, which are statistically impossible to be random, without which life would have been impossible on our planet.[18]
For example, if multiple conditions affecting the expansion of the universe had varied for more than one hundred millionth of one percent right after the Big Bang, life would not exist. If the force that holds together the nucleus of an atom, the strong nuclear interaction, was even slightly changed, there would be no long-burning stars that have the capacity to support life.
There are myriad other examples, one after the other, which point to the intelligent mystery of Cosmos, in which our very existence is sourced anew in every second.
We will return to the deployment and mis-deployment of the anthropic principles in later writings. For now, suffice to say that the principle with which we began our conversation above applies:
Eros generates the gnosis.
Opening the Eye of the Mind and the Eye of Consciousness takes the empirical sensory capacity of the human being who is performing the injunctions, doing the exploration, deeper into the Field of Eros, which itself generates deeper and wider gnosis.
This is part 3 of an early draft of an essay drawn from the forthcoming volumes of The Universe: A Love Story—First Meditations on CosmoErotic Humanism in Response to the Meta-Crisis in the Great Library of CosmoErotic Humanism. The first draft of this essay was written by Dr. Marc Gafni in conversation with Barbara Marx Hubbard and Dr. Zak Stein. It was edited and prepared for publication by Kerstin Tuschik. We welcome substantive feedback as we prepare a more advanced version of this essay.
Footnotes
[1] Tolle, Eckhart, The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment, Namaste, Vancouver, 1997.
[2] This image is just a placeholder for this early draft.
[3] See Wigner, E. P. (1960). “The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics in the natural sciences,” Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics. In this article, Wigner observed that a physical theory’s mathematical structure often paves the way to further advances and even empirical predictions in that theory. From the paper: “It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind's capacity to divine them.”
[4] In mathematics and mathematical logic, Boolean algebra is the branch of algebra in which the values of the variables are the truth values true and false, usually denoted 1 and 0, respectively. It was introduced by George Boole in his first book The Mathematical Analysis of Logic (1847) and more fully in his An Investigation of the Laws of Thought (1854), Prometheus Books, 2003. The term Boolean algebra was first introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce, who gave the title “A Boolean Algebra with One Constant” to the first chapter of his “The Simplest Mathematics” in 1880—Peirce, Charles S. (1931), Collected Papers, Vol. 3. Harvard University Press, p. 13. Boolean algebra has been fundamental in the development of digital electronics and modern programming languages. It is also used in set theory and statistics.
[5] See Kripal, Jeffrey, “Flipped Scientists,” pp. 54-88, in The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, Bellevue Literary Press, 2019.
[6] Ayers writes this right after his near-death experience ( written as an article for The Sunday Telegraph (28th August 1988)). In an article written later, he attenuated this initial claim, seeking apparently to retain his prior stance on such things (A. J. Ayer: Postscript to a Postmortem (15th Oct 1988, Spectator)—). See also Kripal, Jeffrey, “Flipped Scientists,” pp. 60-64, in The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge, Bellevue Literary Press, 2019.
[7] See John Pierrakos, M.D., Core Energetics: Developing the Capacity to Love and Heal, Life Rhythm Publication, 1987.
[8] Ehrenreich is apparently better versed in science than in Eastern mysticism. Eastern mysticism has many forms of expression including expressions similar to her description. See, for example, Lorin Roche, Radiance Sutras, Sounds True, 2014—first published in 2008—(https://archive.org/details/patanjali-yoga-sutras/page/n25/mode/2up), which is a poetic rendition of the eastern classic, the Vijnana Bhairava, See also Kashmir Shaivite teacher and practitioner Sally Kempton on the Vijnana Bhairava, Doorways to the Infinite: The Art and Practice of Tantric Meditation, Sounds True, 2014.
[9] Ehrenreich, B. (2014). Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything. New York: Hatchette Book Group, p. 116.
[10] See, for example, Gafni, Marc, Radical Kabbalah Books 1 and 2, Integral Publishers, 2010, which used the term nondual humanism, Volume 1, pp. Iiii-Iix.
[11] Eben Alexander, Proof of Heaven, Simon & Schuster, 2012, pp. 40, 41, 46, 48.
[12] What are now called Turing machines, first described by Alan Turing in 1936–7 as computing machines or automatic machines, are simple abstract computational devices, which were intended to help investigate the extent and limitations of what can be computed. These machines were specifically devised for the computing of real numbers. They were first named Turing machines by Alonzo Church in a review of Turing’s paper (Church 1937). Today, they are considered to be one of the foundational models of computability and (theoretical) computer science.—See, for example, here: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing-machine/.
[13] Turing is talking about and in fact giving credence to not only intuition but telepathy. For this citation from Turing, see Turing, M. A. (1950) “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” Mind, New Series, Vol. 59, No. 236. (Oct.,1950), pp. 433-460—for this quote especially p. 453—. On telepathy and related issues, see also the eminent Whitehead scholar, Griffin, David Ray (1997). Parapsychology, Philosophy, and Spirituality a Postmodern Exploration. SUNY Press.
[14] The section below on Ramanujan is cited from Georgi Y. Johnson, “The Science & Spirituality of Srinivasa Ramanujan,” 2016, at https://perception.inner-growth.org/the-science-spirituality-of-srinivasa-ramanujan/. The article first appeared on Science and Nonduality (SAND), “The Secrets of Ramanujan’s Garden,” https://www.scienceandnonduality.com/article/the-secrets-of-ramanujans-garden.
[15] Whitehead, Alfred North and Russell, Bertrand, Principia Mathematica, 3 vols., Cambridge University Press, 1910–1913.
[16] See Abraham Kook, Arpelei Tohar, Mists of Purity, p. 46, Jerusalem.
[17] Russell is cited in Germaine Bree, Camus and Sartre, p. 15, Dell Publishing, 1972. For a fuller citation, see Pigden, Charles R., “Bertrand Russell: moral philosopher or unphilosophical moralist?” Published as chapter 15 of Nick Griffin ed. (2004) The Cambridge Companion to Bertrand Russell, Cambridge University Press, pp. 475-506, https://philpapers.org/archive/PIGBRM-2.pdf: “’I cannot see how to refute the arguments for the subjectivity of ethical values’ he declared in 1960, ‘but I am incapable of believing that all that is wrong with wanton cruelty is that I don’t like it. ... when it comes to the philosophy of moral judgements, I am impelled in two opposite directions and remain perplexed. I have already expressed this perplexity in print, and I should deeply rejoice, if I could find or be shown a way to resolve it, but as yet I remain dissatisfied.’” (Pigden, Charles R. (ed.), Russell on Ethics, London: Routledge, 1999. pp. 165-166.)
[18] See Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma, Allen Lane, 2006. Davies, a superlatively regarded physicist is elegantly responding in The Goldilocks Enigma to challenges posed by Nick Bostrom and others in this regard. A quote from the book, cited from “The Goldilocks Enigma” BBC Two, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/6035233.stm: “So, how come existence? At the end of the day, all the approaches I have discussed are likely to prove unsatisfactory. In fact, in reviewing them they all seem to me to be either ridiculous or hopelessly inadequate: a unique universe which just happens to permit life by a fluke; a stupendous number of alternative parallel universes which exist for no reason; a pre-existing God who is somehow self-explanatory; or a self-creating, self-explaining, self-understanding universe-with observers, entailing backward causation and teleology. Perhaps we have reached a fundamental impasse dictated by the limitations of the human intellect. I began this book by saying that religion was the first great systematic attempt to explain all of existence and that science is the next great attempt. Both religion and science draw their methodology from ancient modes of thought honed by many millennia of evolutionary and cultural pressures. Our minds are the products of genes and memes. Now we are free of Darwinian evolution and able to create our own real and virtual worlds, and our information processing technology can take us to intellectual arenas that no human mind has ever before visited, those age-old questions of existence may evaporate away, exposed as nothing more than the befuddled musings of biological beings trapped in a mental straightjacket inherited from evolutionary happenstance. The whole paraphernalia of gods and laws, of space, time and matter, of purpose and design, rationality and absurdity, meaning and mystery, may yet be swept away and replaced by revelations as yet undreamt of.”